中國環境問題日益嚴重，尤其是重大的工業災害，一再發生，主要原因是中央政府雖然訂有嚴格的環保標準及規定，但是到了地方政府執行單位，往往為了經濟開放、工商發展而幾乎對環保規定視若無睹，放手不管。最近內蒙一個小鎮就是因為二個紙廠的污水排放，導致一個村子陷入黑色的污水中，除了在高地的住户外都被破壞不能不遷移。這二個廠早在２００４年就因為排放污水到黃河，導致下游的城鎮好幾天沒水喝。這麼大的事件發生後，中央注意此問題，因此要求污水不能排入黃河，地方政府只好建了好幾個大容器來裝，前幾天遇到大風雨，這些容器搖搖欲墜，地方政府擔心又被風吹壞，污水流入黃河，乾脆就搞個洞，把水往村中倒。居民說，這黑水一下子湧入村中，像洪水般，嚇壞他們。而且肯定是很毒的水。
中國百分之八十的重汅染工廠都在河水旁邊，導致水的品質大受威脅，去年松花江才因工廠重污染導致東北人好幾天沒水喝。民眾抗爭環保事件也愈來愈多，中國日報報導２００５年共有五萬起因為污染而起的抗爭。今年到現在為止環保部門統計就有４９件重大工業污染案件。
Rules ignored, sludge sinks China village
By Jim Yardley The New York Times
Published: September 4, 2006
Dark as soy sauce, perfumed with a chemical stench, the liquid waste from two paper mills overwhelmed the tiny village of Sugai. Villagers tried to construct a makeshift dike, but the toxic water swept it away.
Fifty-seven homes sank into a black, polluted lake.
The April 10 industrial spill, described by five residents of the village in Inner Mongolia, was a small-scale environmental disaster in a country already ridden with them. But Sugai should have been different.
The two mills in question had previously been sued in a landmark case, fined, and ordered to upgrade their pollution equipment after a major spill into the Yellow River in 2004.
The official response to that 2004 spill, praised by the state-run news media, seemed to showcase a new, tougher approach toward pollution - until the later spill at Sugai revealed that, in fact, local officials had never carried out the cleanup orders.
Now, the destruction of Sugai is a lesson in the difficulty of enforcing environmental rules in China.
"The smell made me want to vomit," one villager said recently, as he showed the waist-high watermark on the remains of his home.
There is no shortage of environmental laws and regulations in China, many of them passed in recent years by a central government trying to address one of the worst pollution problems in the world.
But those problems persist, in part, because environmental protection is often subverted by local protectionism, corruption and regulatory inefficiency.
Even as many domestic and international environmental groups now credit China with beginning to take the environment seriously, pollution is actually worsening in some crucial categories.
Emissions of sulfur dioxide, the building block of acid rain, rose by 27 percent between 2000 and 2005; government projections had called for a 20 percent reduction.
"It is clear the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection is coming to a head," said Zhou Shengxian, director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
The broader tension of balancing environmental protection with fast economic growth is not likely to ease. China wants to double the size of its economy by 2020. And yet Zhou did not hesitate to assign much of the blame to corruption and fraud by local officials for undercutting pollution control efforts.
Despite its rising public profile, the State Environmental Protection Administration remains one of the weakest ministries in the central government bureaucracy and has sought to increase its regulatory powers.
For years, it has complained that local environmental protection bureaus are accountable to local officials rather than the state ministry.
This has meant that local regulators had to answer to mayors or other local officials who may have had financial or other interests in protecting polluting industries.
In early August, the ministry announced that it would establish 11 regional offices to monitor pollution problems better.
It also announced that local officials eligible for promotion would be judged on their pollution track record, in addition to how well they deliver economic growth.
Public disgust over pollution is growing. In May, the official English-language newspaper China Daily reported that more than 50,000 disputes and protests arose in 2005 over pollution. Public complaints to the national environmental administration rose by 30 percent.
"We have heard many complaints saying, ’No clean official, no clean water,’" Zhang Lijun, a deputy director at the ministry, told China Daily.
Here in Urad Qianqi, a city along the Yellow River that encompasses Sugai, officials delayed for almost five weeks before finally refusing altogether to be interviewed about the spill. Provincial officials also declined to talk, as did administrators with the paper mills and the local irrigation district.
For decades, the two factories, Saiwai Xinghuazhang Paper and Meili Beichen Paper, dumped their toxic sludge directly into the Yellow River. Five years ago, the introduction of new regulations ended that dumping, and factories began pumping the waste instead into a long drainage canal connected to the region’s intricate irrigation and flood protection system.
But in June 2004, the commission that regulates the irrigation system decided to counteract rising water levels in the system by dumping polluted canal water into the Yellow River.
The release created a pollution slick that killed tens of thousands of fish and plunged the downstream city of Baotou into a drinking water crisis that lasted several days.
Industrial accidents are common in China. Millions of residents in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province in the country’s northeast, were forced to depend on bottled water after a major benzene spill contaminated the Songhua River last November.
During the first four months of 2006, the environmental protection administration reported another 49 "major" industrial accidents and illegal pollution discharges. A study it released last month found that roughly 80 percent of China’s 7,555 more heavily polluting factories are located on rivers or lakes or in heavily populated areas.
The official handling of the 2004 spill into the Yellow River was initially considered a groundbreaking success. The city of Baotou was awarded almost $300,000 in damages from the two factories and the irrigation district in what state news media called the first pollution lawsuit on the Yellow River.
Government regulators ordered the factories shut down to install water recycling and treatment equipment. The ministry ordered the mills to comply with national water emission requirements.
Officials in Urad Qianqi decided instead to build large, temporary wastewater containment pools directly beside the river.
Li Wanzhong, director of the Inner Mongolia Environmental Protection Bureau, concluded that those pools were a threat to the river. China Environment News, the official publication of the state environmental administration, reported that Li had ordered Urad Qianqi to close the factories if they continued to violate emissions standards.
But the factories were never closed. Then, a violent storm last April set off a crisis. High winds threatened to push wastewater from the pools into the Yellow River.
Villagers were told that officials feared another spill into the river would expose their failure to carry out earlier orders. So officials ordered that a containment pool wall be broken so that wastewater could be diverted into a five-kilometer, or three-mile, strip beside the river where several small villages, including Sugai, stood.
The only warning came from a Sugai villager who made a surreptitious telephone call from his job at one of the factories. A dozen farmers frantically tried to build a mud dike.
"The water was too high, and it didn’t work," said one 37-year-old farmer, who, like other villagers, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. "The water came all of a sudden. It was poisonous water, but I don’t know what poisons were in it."
Three months after the spill, the homes remained uninhabitable.
Large pools of black water festered in the lowest-lying areas. All but three houses - built on higher ground - had been abandoned. The farmland, once considered among the best in the area, was contaminated. Most residents relocated to nearby villages after receiving cash settlements.
"The reason this accident happened is that the local government didn’t follow the directives of the central government," said a 40-year-old man whose father had lived in the village.
"They also wanted to protect the local industries."
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